14 May 2016

I lost a fish today. I was feeling good about this 'fish day'- the tanks looked clean, there was not much algae, even though I found more black beard algae on older leaves of buces and crypt wendtii in the thirty-eight, but it didn't upset me much. Just trimmed those leaves off, noticed how well the aponogetons are growing- they look super healthy! and the bacopa very nice as well. If rotala keeps up its growth rate I will have to trim it back soon. I pulled out a few crowded vallisneria, thinned out some of the watersprite thicket and cut out some hornwort- top of the tank was getting crowded and I noticed it was impeding the flow. I planted a few errant stems of bacopa and ludwigia from the tenner into this tank. Thinking how great the buces look in the tenner, how they struggle in my thirty-eight. Maybe I should take them all out of this tank and move them into the tenner, but I'm afraid of spreading the BBA... I was a bit dismayed at the state of buce 'dark godzilla'. I hit it with hydrogen peroxide last week, but it did nothing. This week there's more BBA tufts on all its older leaves. Only the one newest leaf remains clean, and more stem is rotting. I cut it back to almost nothing, I really should just throw that plant away but hate to do it.

But the real bummer came when I was doing water change in the tenner. I looked low on the side of the tank to pluck out discarded ludwigia leaves, which were all down near the substrate level, and saw the white unmoving form of a fish belly curled against the glass. One of my otos, head wedged in between the driftwood and glass wall. It was dead. I don't know why. I swear that fish looked fine yesterday. I guess he got himself stuck between the wood and the wall?

Now I only have one otoclinclus. And I really don't want to buy any more, but he will be lonely.